6 TV Shows That Completely Lost Their Shit

#3. Felicity

The Show:

Once upon a time in 1998, high school senior Felicity is graduating. Hunky Ben signs her yearbook and tells her he wished he'd known her better. He should have just signed "have a cool summer!" because, like any rational person would do, Felicity interprets this completely offhanded comment as a "sign" and dramatically alters her plans so she can follow Ben to college in New York.

Once she gets there, she learns that life in the Big Apple is, like, hard and stuff. She gets a witch with a capital W for a roommate--no, really, she does; the roommate is a Wiccan--and over the course of four increasingly painful seasons, Felicity embarks on a magical journey of personal discovery.

So, What Happened?

Sorcery and time travel.

In 2002, after graduating college, Felicity realizes that she made some pretty poor choices. The rational, adult way to handle things would be to examine her life, steel her resolve and start establishing a fine path to personal success. However, this would require an iota of fortitude, something Felicity never once demonstrated in her three-and-a-half seasons of "following her heart," i.e. being totally selfish.

Instead of forcing Felicity to grow up and learn from her mistakes, the show proves it is truly made of the stuff spoiled girls dream about by concocting a ridiculous plot twist. To help her cope, Felicity's Wiccan roommate sends Felicity back in time one year.

Back. In. Freaking. Time.

Rather than do something worthwhile such as, say, warn her fellow New Yorkers about the now-pending 9/11 attacks, Felicity tries to use her knowledge of future events to make her life superficially better.

Once back in time, Felicity uses the ripple effect to alter the future timelines of her and her friends. She achieves her primary objective: To use her knowledge of the future to engineer a relationship with a man (her freshman year dorm manager) whom she believes to be her ideal mate. Soon, her dream man is in her arms. However, one short episode later, Felicity has already cheated on him. Yes, the miraculous, universe-bending opportunity to travel in time is squandered on a total whore. It was like that show Quantum Leap, if instead of trying to make people's lives better, Scott Bakula had just tried to bone them.

Learning nothing from this entire experience, Felicity begins longing for her old life. Again, the rational, adult thing would be to buck up and try harder. At least bet on some sports and make millions with her future-knowledge. But, no. Instead, she finds some crazy-ass magician, and starts working out a deal. The final episode is spent watching Felicity putting all sorts of now-magic artifacts together for a huge spell that (SPOILER ALERT) may or may not have worked. Who cares?

#2. The Flintstones

The Show:

It's the early 60s, and TV was hurting for an unfunny spoof of life from a million years ago--you know, something the kids could relate to. Instead, the world got The Flintstones, the tale of a prehistoric family who enjoyed a bygone time when it was legal to blatantly rip off The Honeymooners.

For those of you unfamiliar with the back-story behind the vitamin, the gist of it is that fat and unattractive chauvinist pigs Fred and Barney are married to subservient but hot women who are far out of their league. Along for the ride are pet dinosaur "Dino" and, later, babies Pebbles and Bam-Bam, who would later hook up in their own spinoff, in case you cared, which we know you don't.

Most of the shows revolved around Fred and Barney trying to find ways to avoid work and threaten their wives with physical violence. There was a laugh track, because nothing says realism like the idea of a live studio audience present for the taping of an animated show. Oh, and occasionally Fred and Barney shilled for the cigarette companies, as evidenced by this artifact from a more innocent time:

So, What Happened?

Alien astronauts.

After following the daily life of a blue-collar worker in prehistoric times for five seasons, The Flintstones decided they weren't being inaccurate enough in their portrayal of ancient history (for real, who besides Wilma ever used saber-tooth-tiger-tail tampons?) Thus ushered in the mercifully-short-lived era of the Great Gazoo, a squeaky creep who wore some sort of testicle hat.

Gazoo was an honest-to-gosh alien banished from his planet for creating a nuclear device that could kill the entire universe with a push of a button (playing on Cold War apocalypse scenarios is a great way to unite the whole family for a hearty laugh).

Another important aspect of the Great Gazoo is that he can apparently make individual atoms his bitch, allowing him to do anything. For those of you keeping score at home, God is not dead. He's just a tiny green alien with a huge weapon who's trapped in the Stone Age. Breathe easier, mankind.

Gazoo transports Fred and Barney to the future, just to prove a wicked-dumb point about whether a magazine is correct. Frankly, having an all-doing deity at their hands would probably be totally awesome, if only other people could see his work. But only Fred, Barney, Pebbles and Bam-Bam can see him, because they "truly believe." The women? Well, they're less enlightened. And lazy.

Still, he's magic, right? Fred and Barney can get set up like playboy millionaires. Or, this all-knowing, all-seeing power can be needlessly squandered like a $50 bill at a strip club. They use Gazoo's power for the benevolent purpose of winning a few bucks at the racetrack. Later, Gazoo creates two clones of Fred and Barney who are somehow even more mentally challenged (if you were wondering, Fred and Barney use these clones to trick their wives and go bowling).

There must've been some legendary pot going around Hollywood writers' rooms in the 1960s. The show was canceled less than one season later, and it probably took the staff another year to realize it.

#1. Airwolf

The Show:

To explain the premise of what is already a pretty baffling show before it decided to lose all its marbles, let's let Wikipedia sum it up:

We're sold! When can we tune in? Nothing says "surefire hit" like creepy backwoods loner who "serenades eagles." Who can't relate to that? Isn't there a little recluse schizophrenic in all of us?

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the main character is actually a helicopter named Airwolf, and everyone else is just along for the ride. A series of incredibly convoluted plot twists occur involving kidnap, espionage, a volcano and Airwolf, the world's greatest fighting machine unless you have stealth-detecting radar and surface-to-air missiles.

Together, they start running covert ops for a mysterious branch of the CIA called FIRM, and the rest of the series was spent watching Airwolf's crew spend most of their time trying to not run out of plots entirely centered around a helicopter.

However, they had a shoestring budget, which is bad news on a TV show based entirely around futuristic helicopter fight scenes. This led the minor problem of not actually having access to the helicopter at all (they no longer owned it). That's right. They were trying to do an Airwolf series without using any shots of Airwolf.

Thus each episode was carefully constructed from previously aired footage of Airwolf, walking a fine line between hysterically shitty and just plain sad.

Having "solved" the budget problem of a show starring a multi-million-dollar machine, U.S.A. just had to eliminate the only other major expense: actor's salaries. U.S.A. certainly couldn't afford the veteran cast of Airwolf, which included the high-profile star Ernest Borgnine.

There of course was only one solution: HELICOPTER EXPLOSION:

Borgnine's character, played by Borgnine's stunt double, is conspicuously seen only from behind:

...and then dies in the way he knew he always would: in a grainy, poorly-edited stock footage explosion.

They were able to afford to get a couple of minutes of Jan-Michael Vincent, so he was only injured in the explosion. Still, his Airwolfing days were over.

Airwolf was canceled at the end of the first season, though they were probably long out of old Airwolf footage anyway and were on the verge of flinging a toy helicopter through the air with a slingshot. In retrospect, the entire U.S.A. Network should probably have been canceled with it.